Unless you’ve recently survived a Jonas Brothers concert or were in attendance last month when the Angels clinched their division, you haven’t heard cheering quite as overwhelming as the rapturous response that greeted Kylie Minogue’s long-awaited arrival Sunday night at the Hollywood Bowl.

Her ecstatic fans –- predominantly but not entirely gay men –- were so frenzied with excitement, they burst out in thunderous applause for little more than the dropping of a curtain as the house lights dimmed. When the pop superstar from Melbourne finally emerged amid eight dancers in Daft Punk gear for her opening number, “Light Years” –- she was regally lowered to the stage atop a giant silver skull, donning a space-age Grace Jones getup wrapped in peach and blue boas and crowned by a headpiece that made it seem like mirror balls were orbiting her brain –- well, it’s a wonder scores of admirers didn’t faint dead away.

Given such an emotional outpouring, it also was no surprise that Minogue initially didn’t know how to respond. “Well, well!” she merely said after concluding a colorful “Come into My World,” the third tune of her two-hour, 20-songs-plus spectacle. Then she let out a great scream. “When words fail you, that’s a pretty good option, right?”

You have to understand: the internationally beloved dance diva and her minions had waited a very long time for this stateside visit to happen. “Anyone know off the top of their heads how long it’s taken me to get here?” Minogue asked a third of the way into her show, garnering intense and indecipherable hollering in response. “When people talk like that, they’re talking decades.”

Indeed, it’s been more than 20 years since Minogue issued her self-titled debut, led by a kitschy remake of Goffin & King’s “The Loco-Motion” that made only a minor splash in this part of the world.

Back then, she was just growing out of the child-actress, soap-opera phase of her career. Essentially the Miley Cyrus of Down Under -– Ms. Montana could learn a thing or two by studying Kylie’s evolution from squeaky-clean innocent to seductive adult –- Minogue would soon date the late Michael Hutchence (she was the inspiration for INXS’ “Suicide Blonde”) and front a string of synthetic ditties from the Stock, Aitken & Waterman factory, most of which raced up the charts everywhere … but here.

For years her American visibility outside of dance-club circles remained limited to minor (and mercilessly criticized) movie roles –- alongside Jean-Claude Van Damme in Street Fighter, goofing with Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin in Bio-Dome, flitting about the screen oh-so-briefly as the Green Fairy in countryman Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! It wasn’t until earlier this decade, in fact, that she finally scored a full-blown global smash (the U.S. included) with the infectious allure of “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” –- yet even that track’s momentarily ubiquitous presence failed to generate lasting sales here, as have more recent appearances, ranging from a candid chat on The Ellen DeGeneres Show (where she discussed her recovery from breast cancer) to a spotlight on Dancing with the Stars.

All of which has only fed into her fervent stateside cult while simultaneously keeping Kylie from touring North America until this just-begun “micro-tour,” as she put it, which kicked off last week in Oakland’s Fox Theatre to rave reviews and comes to a close Oct. 12-13 with shows at NYC’s Hammerstein Ballroom.

Those are considerably smaller locations than the Hollywood Bowl –- Hammerstein, for instance, is about the size of the Hollywood Palladium. That makes her Bowl debut something of a crowning achievement for this outing –- and, when you consider that the venue was half-sold at most (with tall trees blocking off the upper decks), it makes the tremendous roar of Sunday night’s crowd all the more startling and heartwarming.

Granted, their heroine worship is akin to what Cher receives -– that is, it’s less about what the music says or signifies than how much it matters to these fans to be in the presence of an icon. (It would have been amazing to experience their reaction were Kylie’s techno-heavy set to headline, say, the massive Sahara dance tent at Coachella, where she’d kill in an instant.)

What they responded to was gloriously inch-deep and superficial, gleeful neo-disco taken to dizzyingly glitzy heights, whether Minogue was seen slinking about in a mini-dress and thigh-high boots for a medley of some of her biggest hits (“Shocked,” “What Do I Have to Do?,” “Spinning Around”), or if she surrounded herself with homoerotic imagery and a skin-tight cat-suit for “Red Blooded Woman,” or transformed “The Loco-Motion” into a brassy stripper anthem straight out of Fosse’s Sweet Charity.

It was all increasingly dazzling yet also musically one-dimensional, even when the pace eventually slowed for a finely detailed old-Hollywood pastiche (blending together the songs “White Diamond,” “Confide in Me” and “I Believe in You”) that had the star lounging like Garbo or Harlow on a retro velvet couch adorned by golden lions. It was fitting, too, that such a glamorous sequence was followed by an homage to Madonna –- an interlude that remixed “Burning Up” and ended with Kylie reciting the strike-a-pose rap from “Vogue” –- as all night it had been hard to shake comparisons with the grande dame of dance-pop.

To me, Minogue, now 41, is what Madonna would have been had she stopped progressing after Erotica and instead got permanently bogged down in titillation –- no strides toward deeper Ray of Light significance, just a leap ahead to the electro revival of her latest work. Some prefer that Kylie doesn’t strive for weightier themes, even in light of her battle against cancer; Rufus Wainwright, already a gay icon himself, has dubbed her “the anti-Madonna. … She is what she is and there is no attempt to make quasi-intellectual statements to substantiate it.”

Which is why it almost seems cruel to be critical of her after such a long-overdue celebration of the plastic joy she represents.

That hardly means she fails to provide jubilant entertainment. I’m tickled to have finally seen what has made salivating Aussies and Brits go mad all these years. But I’m also starting to understand why it is Kylie Minogue will only ever be as popular as, oh, Pet Shop Boys ever were over here.

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